Glass has always been considered the main material to use in Modern interior design for its special qualities of transparency and shimmering look, however this didn’t help the criticism it got for the lack of strength against being fragile, so experiments were made to proof its strength and came up with great but expensive results.

Studies has been made by Lars Berglund, a researcher at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, to find a new affordable material with the same quality of transparency but with efficient durability, and so he started working on Swedish lumber to figure out a way to give wood new properties, and the transparent wood composite result came to existence.

The advantage of transparent wood over glass is that it has all the strength of opaque lumber–but still lets in light. This process could be used to create everything from transparent wood structures to load-bearing windows that never crack or shatter. Think of how this could be used to create entirely new types of sustainable solar panels, made-out of wood instead of chemically treated glass.

Right now, Berglund admits he has a lot of work to do before this revolutionary product hits markets. I can only imagine what architects and designers will do with transparent wood when they finally get their hands on it.